The Caxtons: A Family Picture Part 69

Mr. Squills (with the groan of a dissentient at a "Demonstration").--"Oh! oh! oh!"

Luckless Squills! Little could he have foreseen the shower-bath, or rather douche, of erudition that fell splash on his head as he pulled the string with that impertinent Oh! oh! Down first came the Persian war, with Median myriads disgorging all the rivers they had drunk up in their march through the East; all the arts, all the letters, all the sciences, all the notions of liberty that we inherit from Greece,--my father rushed on with them all, sousing Squills with his proofs that without the Persian war Greece would never have risen to be the teacher of the world. Before the gasping victim could take breath, down came Hun, Goth, and Vandal on Italy and Squills.

"What, sir!" cried my father, "don't you see that from those irruptions on demoralized Rome came the regeneration of manhood, the re-baptism of earth from the last soils of paganism, and the remote origin of whatever of Christianity yet exists free from the idolatries with which Rome contaminated the faith?"

Squills held up his hands and made a splutter. Down came Charlemagne, paladins and all! There my father was grand! What a picture he made of the broken, jarring, savage elements of barbaric society. And the iron hand of the great Frank,--settling the nations and founding existent Europe. Squills was now fast sinking into coma or stupefaction; but catching at a straw as he heard the word "Crusades," he stuttered forth, "Ah! there I defy you."

"Defy me there!" cries my father; and one would think the ocean was in the shower-bath, it came down with such a rattle. My father scarcely touched on the smaller points in excuse for the Crusades, though he recited very volubly all the humaner arts introduced into Europe by that invasion of the East, and showed how it had served civilization by the vent it afforded for the rude energies of chivalry, by the element of destruction to feudal tyranny that it introduced, by its use in the emanc.i.p.ation of burghs and the disrupture of serfdom. But he painted, in colors vivid as if caught from the skies of the East, the great spread of Mahometanism and the danger it menaced to Christian Europe, and drew up the G.o.dfreys and Tancreds and Richards as a league of the Age and Necessity against the terrible progress of the sword and the Koran. "You call them madmen," cried my father; "but the frenzy of nations is the statemanship of fate! How know you that--but for the terror inspired by the hosts who marched to Jerusalem--how know you that the Crescent had not waved over other realms than those which Roderic lost to the Moor?

If Christianity had been less a pa.s.sion, and the pa.s.sion had less stirred up all Europe, how know you that the creed of the Arab (which was then, too, a pa.s.sion) might not have planted its mosques in the forum of Rome and on the site of Notre Dame? For in the war between creeds,--when the creeds are embraced by vast races,--think you that the reason of sages can cope with the pa.s.sion of millions? Enthusiasm must oppose enthusiasm. The crusader fought for the tomb of Christ, but he saved the life of Christendom."

My father paused. Squills was quite pa.s.sive; he struggled no more,--he was drowned.

"So," resumed Mr. Caxton, more quietly, "so, if later wars yet perplex us as to the good that the All-wise One draws from their evils, our posterity may read their uses as clearly as we now read the finger of Providence resting on the barrows of Marathon, or guiding Peter the Hermit to the battlefields of Palestine. Nor, while we admit the evil to the pa.s.sing generation, can we deny that many of the virtues that make the ornament and vitality of peace sprang up first in the convulsion of war!" Here Squills began to evince faint signs of resuscitation, when my father let fly at him one of those numberless waterworks which his prodigious memory kept in constant supply. "Hence," said he, "hence, not unjustly has it been remarked by a philosopher, shrewd at least in worldly experience [Squills again closed his eyes, and became exanimate]: 'It is strange to imagine that war, which of all things appears the most savage, should be the pa.s.sion of the most heroic spirits. But 't is in war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn; 't is in war that mutual succor is most given, mutual danger run, and common affection most exerted and employed: for heroism and philanthropy are almost one and the same!'" (1)

My father ceased, and mused a little. Squills, if still living, thought it prudent to feign continued extinction.

"Not," said Mr. Caxton, resuming, "not but what I hold it our duty never to foster into a pa.s.sion what we must rather submit to as an awful necessity. You say truly, Mr. Squills,--war is an evil; and woe to those who, on slight pretences, open the gates of Ja.n.u.s,--

"'The dire abode, And the fierce issues of the furious G.o.d.'"

Mr. Squills, after a long pause,--employed in some of the more handy means for the reanimation of submerged bodies, supporting himself close to the fire in a semi-erect posture, with gentle friction, self-applied, to each several limb, and copious recourse to certain steaming stimulants which my compa.s.sionate hands prepared for him,--stretches himself and says feebly, "In short, then, not to provoke further discussion, you would go to war in defence of your country. Stop, sir, stop, for Heaven's sake! I agree with you, I agree with you! But, fortunately, there is little chance now that any new Boney will build boats at Boulogne to invade us."

Mr. Caxton.--"I am not so sure of that, Mr. Squills. [Squills falls back with a gla.s.sy stare of deprecating horror.] I don't read the newspapers very often, but the past helps me to judge of the present."

Therewith my father earnestly recommended to Mr. Squills the careful perusal of certain pa.s.sages in Thucydides, just previous to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war (Squills hastily nodded the most servile acquiescence), and drew an ingenious parallel between the signs and symptoms foreboding that outbreak and the very apprehension of coming war which was evinced by the recent lo p.a.w.ns to peace. (2) And after sundry notable and shrewd remarks, tending to show where elements for war were already ripening, amidst clashing opinions and disorganized states, he wound up with saying: "So that, all things considered, I think we had better just keep up enough of the bellicose spirit not to think it a sin if we are called upon to fight for our pestles and mortars, our three-percents, goods, chattels, and liberties. Such a time must come, sooner or later, even though the whole world were spinning cotton and printing sprigged calicoes. We may not see it, Squills, but that young gentleman in the cradle whom you have lately brought into light, may."

"And if so," said my uncle, abruptly, speaking for the first time,--"if indeed it be for altar and hearth!" My father suddenly drew in and pished a little, for he saw that he was caught in the web of his own eloquence.

Then Roland took down from the wall his son's sword. Stealing to the cradle, he laid it in its sheath by the infant's side, and glanced from my father to us with a beseeching eye. Instinctively Blanche bent over the cradle, as if to protect the Neogilos; but the child, waking, turned from her, and attracted by the glitter of the hilt, laid one hand l.u.s.tily thereon, and pointed with the other, laughingly, to Roland.

"Only on my uncle's proviso," said I, hesitatingly. "For hearth and altar,--nothing less!"

"And even in that case," said my father, "add the shield to the sword!"

and on the other side of the infant he placed Roland's well-worn Bible, blistered in many a page with secret tears.

There we all stood, grouping round the young centre of so many hopes and fears, in peace or in war, born alike for the Battle of Life. And he, unconscious of all that made our lips silent and our eyes dim, had already left that bright bauble of the sword and thrown both arms round Roland's bended neck.

"Herbert!" murmured Roland; and Blanche gently drew away the sword--and left the Bible.

(1) Shaftesbury.

(2) When this work was first published, Mr. Caxton was generally deemed a very false prophet in these antic.i.p.ations, and sundry critics were pleased to consider his apology for war neither seasonable nor philosophical. That Mr. Caxton was right, and the politicians opposed to him have been somewhat ludicrously wrong, may be briefly accounted for,--Mr. Caxton had read history.